Woodward Cautions against Secret Government

“You can’t take the public out of the equation,” Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Bob Woodward said Wednesday evening in Fisher Auditorium. “Democracies die in darkness.”

Woodward, this year’s speaker for the First Commonwealth Endowed Lecture Series, emphasized the need for transparency in government during his program “From Nixon to Bush: What Can President Obama Learn from Presidents Past?”

Woodward, who gained fame as an investigative reporter at the Washington Post for his coverage of the Watergate scandal, highlighted a few “lessons” he learned from his years of reporting on issues faced by various presidents—from Richard Nixon’s resignation and eventual pardoning by Gerald Ford to George W. Bush’s decision to wage war on Iraq to the ongoing challenges of the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Woodward also took questions from the audience on topics ranging from President Obama’s relationship with Fox News to the future of investigative journalism in light of the economic hardships faced by newspapers.